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I'm hoping this is a really minor topic, but since I've not seen any comments on this I figured I may as well raise it.

Will it be possible to pause LT with a single keypress (e.g. hit Esc or similar)?

The only reason why I would even ask this is because when I'm playing Elite Dangerous, and my wife calls me to attend to some emergency, there's nothing more annoying than when this happens while I'm in combat, and I can't simply hit escape and pause the game. (Instead, the game says I have endure a 15 second timeout before I can be removed from the game area, allowing NPCs* to pummel me while I'm helpless - understandable if I'm playing Open, but as I play Solo, I fail to see why an instant pause can't be implemented - especially since they have already implemented this in the training scenarios).

Like I said, this is a minor 'feature' but I feel one so obvious that it could be overlooked.

Maybe I should write this in 15 different colours, underlined, and blinking.
This is super-important to me.

Once you're dealing with fleets, multiple ship types, and 3D positioning, you will be hard pressed to do the admiral thing because in the game, you don't have a staff to deal with all the minutiae of a complex battle.

Alternative: A slider where you can adjust the passage of time while "paused" from 0 - 100 %.
This way the OCD micromanagers can have their way but those who'd rather like a more "realtime" or "bullet time" feel, can have their perfect game.

Currently the game does not pause in menus, and I think I will keep it this way. I like to feel the world continuing on around me when I'm in menus, and, as you said, it also introduces nice opportunities to interact with the menus while you're waiting for something like autopilot.

Just to be fair, all games *are* turn based. Even if turns are so short the player doesn't notice that they happen. :V

This is true in the same sense that human cognition is turn-based -- and thus that a person's entire consciousness can be paused perfectly and indefinitely -- because neurons have a clock speed.

Which is is to say, not so much.

If clock-based low-level processing meant every game is turn-based at the mechanics design level, then all the people still complaining that BethSoft's Fallout 3 & 4 aren't "real" Fallout because they aren't turn-based like Fallout 1 & 2 would have to find a different reason to criticize the newer games. (Yes, I know, they already do.)

I'm just saying, you want pausing, you get it for free by designing a game to be turn-based. For the subset of games that work as turn-based fun, that's a nice benefit.

Just to be fair, all games *are* turn based. Even if turns are so short the player doesn't notice that they happen. :V

This is true in the same sense that human cognition is turn-based -- and thus that a person's entire consciousness can be paused perfectly and indefinitely -- because neurons have a clock speed.

Which is is to say, not so much.

If clock-based low-level processing meant every game is turn-based at the mechanics design level, then all the people still complaining that BethSoft's Fallout 3 & 4 aren't "real" Fallout because they aren't turn-based like Fallout 1 & 2 would have to find a different reason to criticize the newer games. (Yes, I know, they already do.)

I'm just saying, you want pausing, you get it for free by designing a game to be turn-based. For the subset of games that work as turn-based fun, that's a nice benefit.

Just to be fair, all games *are* turn based. Even if turns are so short the player doesn't notice that they happen. :V

This is true in the same sense that human cognition is turn-based -- and thus that a person's entire consciousness can be paused perfectly and indefinitely -- because neurons have a clock speed.

Which is is to say, not so much.

If clock-based low-level processing meant every game is turn-based at the mechanics design level, then all the people still complaining that BethSoft's Fallout 3 & 4 aren't "real" Fallout because they aren't turn-based like Fallout 1 & 2 would have to find a different reason to criticize the newer games. (Yes, I know, they already do.)

I'm just saying, you want pausing, you get it for free by designing a game to be turn-based. For the subset of games that work as turn-based fun, that's a nice benefit.

except your brain doesnt have a globally synchronised clock or sim ticks
which every game running on current computing hardware does have, even the most highly paralellised ones

I wondered if you'd go there. You went there.

Yes, I'm familiar with computer clocks. My first computer used a 6809E processor -- the "E" stood for "external clock," which meant that although the normal tick rate from the crystal was set to 0.89 MHz [sic], if you POKEd the right number into the multiplier memory address, you could double the clock rate to a blistering 1.8 MHz.

Which is interesting, but also not relevant to games because games (and other apps) don't talk to the clock directly; they go through an API to use a function like setTimer() or setInterval() (such as in Talvieno's simulation) that fires an interrupt after X milliseconds. And a game can have lots of those, all with different values. Which means there's no synchronization to a single global clock, and maybe not even to a single timer interrupt, that makes a game "turn-based" at that very low level, any more than a human brain whose neurons are all firing at different times is turn-based... which was my earlier point.

If you want a real pause capability, you have to build it in at a high level; Silverware was making a funny. My comment was nothing more than that designing a game to be turn-based gives you pausing for free; the end of every turn is equivalent to "suspend all gameplay processing until listenForHumanInput() is fired," i.e., pause. Otherwise you have to make special arrangements for how you organize your core loop, as Dinosawer suggested.

...I swear, 500 years ago you'd have been arguing that angels couldn't dance on the head of a pin.

Which is interesting, but also not relevant to games because games (and other apps) don't talk to the clock directly; they go through an API to use a function like setTimer() or setInterval() (such as in Talvieno's simulation) that fires an interrupt after X milliseconds. And a game can have lots of those, all with different values. Which means there's no synchronization to a single global clock, and maybe not even to a single timer interrupt, that makes a game "turn-based" at that very low level, any more than a human brain whose neurons are all firing at different times is turn-based... which was my earlier point.

If you want a real pause capability, you have to build it in at a high level; Silverware was making a funny. My comment was nothing more than that designing a game to be turn-based gives you pausing for free; the end of every turn is equivalent to "suspend all gameplay processing until listenForHumanInput() is fired," i.e., pause. Otherwise you have to make special arrangements for how you organize your core loop, as Dinosawer suggested.

Except that Dinosawer's "special arrangements" are not special at all - in fact, it's how all basically all (competently-coded) games are structured. Even turn-based games. You have synchronisation to a single global clock because it's much easier to structure things that way - usually this global clock is the screen's refresh rate, or some divisor of it.

The only time you'd use a different structure is when you're dealing with online interactions - and typically you don't have a pause at all then, with even turn-based games applying a time limit for online interactions.

Which is interesting, but also not relevant to games because games (and other apps) don't talk to the clock directly; they go through an API to use a function like setTimer() or setInterval() (such as in Talvieno's simulation) that fires an interrupt after X milliseconds. And a game can have lots of those, all with different values. Which means there's no synchronization to a single global clock, and maybe not even to a single timer interrupt, that makes a game "turn-based" at that very low level, any more than a human brain whose neurons are all firing at different times is turn-based... which was my earlier point.

If you want a real pause capability, you have to build it in at a high level; Silverware was making a funny. My comment was nothing more than that designing a game to be turn-based gives you pausing for free; the end of every turn is equivalent to "suspend all gameplay processing until listenForHumanInput() is fired," i.e., pause. Otherwise you have to make special arrangements for how you organize your core loop, as Dinosawer suggested.

Except that Dinosawer's "special arrangements" are not special at all - in fact, it's how all basically all (competently-coded) games are structured. Even turn-based games. You have synchronisation to a single global clock because it's much easier to structure things that way - usually this global clock is the screen's refresh rate, or some divisor of it.

...unless you're like me and when I was starting out programming, I found it easier to do everything multithreaded (POSIX threads, btw), so I didn't have a global clock. I had queues and different pipelines and different 'engines' handling the different data flows. Of course, then you can argue which one was the 'real' engine and go from there.

Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.